ZX Spectrum 48k

My first computer was the ZX Spectrum 48k and despite its humble processor and meagre amount of RAM it managed to run a full-featured flight simulator and some pretty cool arcade games.

Who can forget the rubber keyboard, the screeching sounds and flashing colours as you loaded games by cassette tape, the "R tape loading error" message when you had just spent ten minutes trying to load Horace Goes Skiing.

Message boards

Do You Remember ZX Spectrum 48k?

Do You Remember ZX Spectrum 48k?

i remember how i used to treasure my old speccy
going to super drugs the high street chemist who for some reason had a selection of zx spectrum games for sale basic cheap graphics or text only games but they were still games and only 99p
what fun it was setting up the thing to tune it in to the tv then put in a tape into your own tape recorder you connected through leads at the side of the computer as the tape went round you had that glorious screaching squeeking whistling computer programme noise it went on for ages untill all those sqelches etc actually produced a game unless for some reason between the tape deck and zx a bleep or two had been missed which meant it didnt load and you had to do it all over again

My folks used to own a newsagents and when ever Your Sinclair / Crash came out with its tape on I used to copy it and go round to my friends house to try the demos. I remember we spent days typing in an adventure programme and upon finishing it and running it it had an a$ error. No matter how much we went through the lines of programming and trying different things we could not get it to work. Its one thing I remember to this day. 'if a$="y" then gosub' cant remember the rest. Best game was Geoff Crammonds Stunt Car Racer

Loved my Spectrum, and have many memories of fighting to play on it with my sister and two brothers. We loved Attic Attack, Chuckie Egg, Fred, (You were an archeologist and had to excape from a maze before the Mummies got you) Jet Set Willy and Daly Thompsons Decathlon. Remember having to memorise a whole set of keys for moving about the screen (a was left, s was right, l and m were up and down and space bar for jump etc) Did they not have arrow keys in those days?!?

i had 1 wen i was little and they were well out of date by then, but i loved it (especially manic minor!). i remember coming home one day and trying to find it only to be be told that my mum had sold it for £5 at the boot fair!!!!! nooooooooo! how i miss u spectrum!

The Joy! The Frustration!! The B****y annoying noise that Firebird games made as they loaded!!! I consider myself blessed to have seen the home computer revolution go from the humble zx 48k to wiis and massively powerful PCs yet i still feel that some of the best and most addictive games ever squeezed into a pitifully small amount of memory were made for the speccy 48. Got hold of an emulator and a bunch of the old favourites and the nostalgia of reading "Morkin was slain by wolves. He thinks again" almost overpowered me! The only annoying thing is that there are many great games (like carrier command) available on emulator but without the manual which you need to get into the game in the first place. Arrgghh!!! Can anyone help with this one by the way?

The 23rd of April 2007 is the 25th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum's launch. I doubt Sir Clive Sinclair ever imagined it would become the biggest games machine of the 1980s, at least in the UK. Even today plenty of new games are being produced for this machine.